Emerging biotechnologies: full report - Nuffield Council on Bioethics

E m e r g i n g b i o t e c h n o l o g i e s
question will differ from case to case. Sometimes participation may be seen as a means to
foster greater ‘trust’, ‘credibility’ or ‘legitimation’ for particular institutions or technologies. At
other times, instrumental objectives may highlight outcomes like ‘public understanding’
(according to a particular framing of an issue) or ‘public acceptance’ of a particular technology.
Instrumentalism can, of course, just as much characterise organised participation to close off
institutionally favoured choices. An instrumental perspective is apparent in an evaluative
criterion that public engagement should yield results that are useful to policy makers. 330
5.27 Finally, a substantive rationale for public engagement focuses on issues relating to ‘public
good’, of the kind that concern us here. Like the instrumental view this concerns the outcomes
of public engagement, rather than the process. But unlike an instrumental view, the outcomes in
question are not favoured in relation to (often implicit) sectional interests. Under a substantive
view, what counts as a positive outcome is determined according to explicit publicly-deliberated
values. Of course, each of these values may be understood in different ways by different actors,
but they nevertheless transcend sectional interests and understandings attached to particular
positions, institutions or technologies. It is in transcending these interests through dialogue in
this way that participants create a public frame in which social decisions may be ethically posed.
In short, under a substantive view, public engagement offers a way to make better decisions. 331
C H A P T E R 5
Purposes and values of public engagement
5.28 If a reason for carrying out public engagement is in order to make better decisions, we ought to
be able to able to answer the following question: why should involving public perspectives in
decisions about emerging <strong>biotechnologies</strong> lead to better decisions?
5.29 Firstly, for interdisciplinary problems of the kind we are interested in, no single individual (or
community) is likely to have sufficient expertise in all the dimensions that are likely to be
important. To take an example, if a decision needed to be made about whether synthetic
biology could provide appropriate responses to problems of food security, not just molecular
biology would have to be taken into consideration, but also questions about agronomy and
economics, among other things. Indeed, the specialist knowledge implicated in such decisions
typically go beyond even the entirety of organised academic disciplines, also involving – as they
often do – the experience, insight and expertise of subsistence farmers, local communities,
small businesses, and food consumers.
5.30 This argues for a broadening, perhaps a radical broadening, of the range of expertise informing
decisions. But the broadening of the scope of relevant interests leads to increasing difficulty in
maintaining the distinction between expert and non-expert. This is not a matter of diluting or
negating disciplinary perspectives, or imagining that public engagement may somehow provide
a neutral way of arbitrating among them, it is rather that the radical broadening of admitted
interests turns the discursive space into a public space. It is therefore, by definition, not possible
for any particular specialism to claim definitive expertise. Like other exercises in the balancing of
contending positions; this is a matter for political judgment. 332
5.31 Secondly, for questions with significant social and economic implications, the scientific experts
on whom policy makers most typically rely are unlikely to possess the <strong>full</strong> range of appropriate
expertise. 333 Even with respect to the social implications of a specialised and highly technical
330 See paragraph 5.7ff.
331 It is evident from any reflection on actual public engagement exercises that they often mix these three rationales, implicitly or
explicitly. Thus they may be try to foster public trust while at the same time trying to improve the quality of decision making
by engaging those who stand to be affected by the decision.
332 See paragraphs 5.1 and 5.29. Of course, some disciplinary criteria may be agreed to be more relevant to a given decision
than others and they should rightly be given more prominence – the point is that they should be agreed to be so, rather than
being imposed as such.
333 Arie Rip engagingly talks about the “folk theories” of scientists – scientists speculating about the social dimensions of their
policy advice by guessing what the public thinks on the basis of their limited acquaintances, what they read in
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